Twelve Per Night
by KING FELIX
Summary: Dear Jim, can you fix it fr me to do a story that collapses under the sheer weight of its cultural references, like an imploding submarine, & also it feels eerily transcendental? Written on a single bank holiday, fittingly the one where Bin Laden got shot


Twelve Per Night

'Dominated by wrong desires, it seeks to enhance its fictitious individuality by communion with the things of the fictitious world which it inhabits. This is a difficult undertaking and can rarely be completely performed in this life'.

- C.E.M Joad, 'God and Evil'.

'Don't you just hate it when people tell you their dreams? If you were walking down a street and you really did see giant pink lizard coming out of Marks and Spencer, you'd be interested. Well, you'd be a bit interested'.

- Alexei Sayle

02.47. Overwrought psychologist Kris Kelvin receives a publisher's acceptance letter for the novel written by his dead wife (though he was never married and only briefly had girlfriends). Oddly, the letter arrives in an envelope which resembles one of his father's minimum wage pay slips. The publishers require him to visit their offices that very day, and he duly rushes from his Kafka-esque flat. Outside, the atmosphere is well-contrasted, with super-low air pressure and nebulous clouds. A gang of three-legged dogs moves laboriously past him, but he has no time to consider the implications of this, only that it's insanely poignant. As he walks apace through the park, a recently lobotomised child molester angrily bellows that his dead wife's novel is embarrassing and overzealous. Dr Kelvin skilfully ignores this; in any case, he cares very little about the opinions of the lobotomised man (Sigmund Freud Blue). Nevertheless, the accumulated anxiety prompts him to stop and examine the proof copy of the novel. He sees at once that large banks of the text have been subtly rewritten. He sets out to confront the publishers with renewed vigour. As he nears the skyscraper, the sequence from 'X-Men: The Last Stand' is played out, wherein Bird Man plunges through one of the upper story windows and hurtles (rhymes with 'turtles') towards the ground. But here the arc is too tight, and he hits the concrete with a thud. At first, it seems that Bird Man is surely dead, before he abruptly shoots forward, knocking Dr Kelvin from his feet. Flat on the ground, he feels blood oozing from the back of his head; the ghost of his dead wife moves to his side and urges him to die. But he is incapable of dying. Standing to the right, to the South-South-East, is Sigmund Freud Yellow. "Frankly I'm baffled. Shall we make love?".

02.53. Kris Kelvin takes a lunch break from his new job, as the theatrical agent of the British actor Terence Stamp. In the high street of a new but archetypal town, he ducks inside a little newso and snatches up a Playboy Special Edition, 'Nudes'. At the counter is a conspicuously beautiful girl, and he probably wouldn't have bought it here if he'd known. Not only is the girl conspicuously beautiful, he remembers at once that this is his new girlfriend. Weirdly, as she stares at the magazine, neither of them feels any embarrassment -only a spiking of intellectual interest. The girl, Hari, tells him she has a Hollywood film which they can watch tonight, about this very subject. Kris Kelvin greatly anticipates their seeing it. The film is a western, concerning the efforts of two bounty-hunter anti-heroes to re-take a fort which has been seized by bourgeois rapists. As he and Hari check their guns, and ready their horses, he has rarely if ever been happier. A three-legged dog beholds their efforts and is neither happy or sad. The odds are insurmountable, yet they gallop towards the fort at break-neck speed and Kelvin feels sure that this is what life is all about. No sooner do the bourgeois bandits duck up from the plaster walls, than he takes aim and shoots, hitting nearly every one. At the reverse side of the fort, the great mahogany gates have been left ajar, leading the way to an avenue of Biblical-style sand huts. From one of these comes a barrage (rhymes with 'harrahs'), from a teenage gunman with a steady aim and a flat refusal to die. Even within a few feet, his body simply absorbs Kelvin's bullets - and this is eventually explained by the fact that the teenager is already dead. His rigor mortis has frozen him into a firing position and he continues to pull the trigger as a mindless reflex. Kelvin tries to stifle the barrel of the gun, but merely succeeds in tearing his own hands to pieces. He tries to remove the shooting-iron from the boy's grasp, but in the fumbling catches a bullet in his heart. Kelvin is consumed by his hatred of the teenager, and the sheer power of his loathing magically heals his wounds. The dead teenager laughs drunkenly.

02.55. Having returned to his home town, psychologist and philosopher Kris Kelvin is walking past the luxurious Arafat Hotel when the Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman appears at a window and beckons him inside. She shows him a series of sketchy, black-and-white surveillance photos. They are all disparate (for example, one merely shows a three-legged dog, another, the Easter Island statues). She tells him that she has devised a plan to go back in time and rescue Jesus from being crucified. Kelvin is game. They step onto Doom's time machine. Alongside them is Sigmund Freud Black and Carl Jung Orange, who will come along, she explains, to make sure they don't damage the time-line too severely. As the square of light rises and envelopes them, his new friend turns to face him. 'I'm not really Nicole Kidman'. Kelvin says, thinking he's being pithy, 'I'm not really Kris Kelvin'. But the girl smiles a little too profoundly, at irony he can hardly understand. In Golgotha, the Roman Empire has been re-imagined as a vast network of students. The disproportionate taxation, the dubious spiritual bond with the temple elders - all of this is simply a means of keeping their tuition fees low. As the students lounge around before a freshly crucified Jesus, Kelvin and Alt-Kidman take great pleasure in wrecking them with heavy sections of two-by-four. Alt-Kidman then stands before the cross, menacingly brandishing the wood, while Kelvin climbs up and wrestles down The Man. His body is curiously light, weighing next to nothing. Together, the three of them flee (rhymes with 'glee') across the hill towards the time-travel dust-off point. More students converge. Normally the heart-and-soul of laziness and complacency, they've been threatened with having to do a day's work, and this is an outrage. Events take a bizarre turn when Jesus' body starts to disintegrate; it has the consistency of tin-foil. Students, slags and bourgeois alike scramble for shreds, which they affix to their foreheads in the mistaken belief it will bless them. Kelvin and Alt-Kidman are quietly pleased by the fact that they've saved the best part of Jesus for themselves; his Eastwood-squinting eye. But where to put it, to keep it safe? Kelvin suggests hiding it between the pages of her own novel. 'What makes you think I ever wrote a novel?', asks Alt-Kidman, searching his eyes.

02.58. Kris Kelvin, terrorist, sits in the separately partitioned section of a soon-to-be-hijacked air-liner. The other terrorists are debating whether to go ahead with their plan. While many are having second thoughts, and the others are uncomprehending fundamentalists, Kelvin merely feels a sense of cosmic momentum. Perhaps he just wants to feel the maximum degree of drama which is inherent in each passing moment? Eventually, he is nominated to wrestle his way into the cockpit and gain control of the plane. En route, a sky marshal that looks like Raylan Givens stands up to try and halt him. Something like a psychic warning or a subtle cosmic truism passes between them in a glance, and the marshal stands down. On the other side of a small white door (rhymes with 'whore'), Kelvin threatens the pilot. 'Please don't hurt me. I have a pet dog'. He folds down the sun-guard to reveal a photo of himself and a three-legged dog. For the first time, Kelvin wonders what to do, before events sweep him up again. Events, 'things happening' - perhaps these are the true enemies of mankind? The cockpit window fills with huge, sliding grey monoliths; they are flying low inside the city. What's more, the pilot has made a diametric quantum leap inside his own mind. For no reason, he actually _wants_ to crash the plane now, except there's interference on the radio, and traffic control can't tell him where the target is. Kelvin fiddles with the tuner, coming up with static, disparate voices, distant foreign music which adds up to less than the most obscure Aphex Twin free-ambient. Occasionally, with an infinitesimally delicate turn of his finger, he hears a few notes of 'Somebody Up There Likes Me' by David Bowie. He ponders the music as if it has a special meaning, right up to the point when the air-liner compacts itself into a skyscraper and fire becomes the lot of the world. Somehow, nobody dies. Nobody in the plane and nobody in the building, and it's so fantastical he can hardly even think of it as a miracle.

03.03. The Dharma Initiative conducts a wide-spread census on how people conceive of God (rhymes with 'plod'). Kris Kelvin turns out to one of the interview stations, where he waits in a corridor with other disparate members of the general public. He sits on a brittle plastic chair outside a gym, which has been commandeered as a make-shift interview room. He can hear what the other people are telling the interviewer and hates them all. He hates the careful, sophisticated conceptions just as much as the lazy, simplistic ones. Sometimes a Buddhist appears and he just wants to run in and strangle them, and then eat a bullet himself. Finally, he finds himself sitting before the Dharma inquisitor. It's the British actor Terence Stamp. Kelvin speaks with a strangely bitter tone, words to the effect that the world is an exercise in character-building preordained by your own belief, the very concept of belief given consciousness. Terence Stamp thanks him and calls for the next interviewee. Wracked by bitterness and a lack of self-expression, he staggers out of the building and into a petrol station, where he picks up a 80cl. bottle of Glen Orchy, the intention of drinking himself to death now fully in play. In front of him in the queue is an attractive red-headed girl carrying a manuscript. She asks him if he's had his Dharma interview; he smiles grimly, and says that he fooled it up. The manuscript, it transpires, is her own attempt to explain about God. Music: 'Somebody Up There Likes Me' by David Bowie. It's the ringtone of her mobile phone. 'Aren't you going to answer that?', he asks her. 'Do you think I should?', she replies solemnly.

03.05. Holiday time in Lake District. Impossibly, Kris Kelvin is with Mary Viveash, his girlfriend of ten years previously. They are together again, interacting quite casually as if there had never been any disharmony. Yet in a small corner of his soul, he feels profoundly eerie, as if |^"" ¬^| ¬" " ¬^| :^¬¬.'^"||^¬|^"" ¬/'. Along on the trip is Tigs McGee, Mary's best friend who is treating herself to a holiday after recently winning a defamation case (an unscrupulous author wrote a novel about her life, which wasn't in the least bit veiled or fictionalised). Also in the vehicle is a pseudo-jock (rhymes with 'lock'), who Kelvin doesn't know. Driving down a tree-and-hill-canopied road, they pass an attractive female hiker, and the pseudo-jock says something sexist, and everyone laughs. Kelvin says something ironic and knowing, which the others take for unacceptable sexism, even though it was far milder that what the jock said. They order him out of the car and drive off; he feels only trace levels of outrage, which soon fade to nothing. He catches up with the female hiker (even though, logically, she should be behind him). It transpires that Mary Viveash and co. gave her a note to give to him. He briefly looks at it: it's written in green and red ink, the green passages written by Viveash, the red by Tigs McGee. Between the paragraphs is a crude drawing of a three-legged dog. Kelvin feels about as much enthusiasm to read it as to randomly walk in front of a car, and so he coolly places the letter in his mouth and swallows. This reaction impresses the female hiker. She takes him to the cave where she has been camping. As fuel for the camp fire she has some books which have fallen from the back of a lorry; either two-dozen duplicate copies of a wrongly-translated Koran, or a whole collection of Stephen King novels. Kelvin explains that he's spent his whole life wrestling with the question of whether Stephen King is an acceptable pulp writer or an arrogant hack. He must decide now, she tells him.

03.09. Having returned to his home town, newspaper columnist Kris Kelvin is walking past the luxurious Arafat Hotel when the Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman appears at a window and beckons him inside. She shows him a series of sketchy, black-and-white surveillance photos. They are all disparate (for example, one merely shows the wing of an air-liner, another, a three-legged dog). She tells him that she has devised a plan to go back in time and persuade Hitler to stop the holocaust. Kelvin is game. They step onto Doom's time machine. Alongside them is Carl Jung Blue and Carlos Castaneda Grey, who will come along, she explains, to make sure they don't damage the time-line too severely. As the square of light rises and envelopes them, he suggests to Alt-Kidman that they are archetypes, since, at some point, everyone has imagined trying to persuade Hitler to stop the holocaust. 'No', says Alt-Kidman unhappily, 'they really haven't'. They enter the Eagle's Nest dressed as high-ranking Nazi generals; Hitler's office is adorned with opaque-green rocks. There are paperweights made of it, lamps, pens, picture frames. The party badge on Hitler's lapel is a particularly bright piece. Under his breath, Kelvin warns Alt-Kidman to be careful with him, since prolonged exposure to kryptonite drives a man loco. She disagrees, saying that it creates a necessary dialogue between madness, sanity and entropy. Kelvin takes the lead and tells Hitler that he will allow him to win the war, but he has to close down the concentration camps. 'Put them on a desert island, dump them in the outback, whatever. Just don't kill them'. Hitler is incredulous, and hands Kelvin surveillance photos of his own concentration camps for students, accusing him of being a hypocrite. Words fly up into Kelvin's mouth, then dry up, that there are hard-working Jews and lazy Jews, but all students are parasites who can't even _conceive_ of utilitarian work. These ideas are fully-formed, but something prevents them from passing through his lips. He is frustrated and wants to die (rhymes with 'rye').

03.13. The Nobel Literature All-Time Top 100 Awards. World-famous book-reviewer Kris Kelvin is the compere of the evening and is tasked with saying something requisite as each writer comes up on stage. His co-host for the evening is a strange new version of the Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman. As each winner makes their speech, he frantically scans the Top 100 list to see where Samuel Beckett comes, as he's one of his heroes and wants nothing more than to meet him. Every now and again, he glances up to see the famous and respected authors making their speeches (rhymes with 'breeches'). On greeting William S Burroughs, he says, 'Go on, potty-mouth, get up there', and the audience laughs. But it becomes increasingly hard to summon any enthusiasm. 'Howard Jacobson, of course, famous for his role as Gwildor in the 1989 film adaptation of 'Masters of the Universe''. A single person in the audience laughs. Shakespeare arrives on stage, and Kelvin shakes his hand with a kind of grudging awe, and in fact they end up hugging. Comes Dickens. 'Does anyone, anyone you've ever met, anyone you can conceive of, actually like this man's writing?' Kelvin throws the award at his crotch. Agatha Christie - Kelvin spends the whole time violently coughing into his fist, 'HACK! HACK!' Blind, emotionally-masterful Aldous Huxley, and his presence just makes Kelvin want to cry. Eventually, the winner-of-winners arrives. It's Alisdair Grey, an old man; Kelvin mournfully remembers how he used to be his own favourite author, before he learned how university-centric the man was, how he believed in students and art as a legitimate alternative to real work. After a grudging hand-over of the award, which is a strange glass model of a three-legged dog, Alt-Kidman whispers into his ear, 'The award contains a doomsday device'. She hands him a small remote control, a red button which he is tantalisingly ready to push.

03.17. In the middle of the Pacific, U-boat Captain Kris Kelvin has been surviving for some time, alone, in a life-raft. His rations are gone and efforts the catch fish are as-yet unsuccessful. Every now and again a gang of students glides up underneath the vessel and upsets the keel. No not students, sharks. Very often, he believes he sees a strip of land in the far distance, but it's always illusory. Until eventually, he picks out individual ridges of trees and the indentations of sunlight on land (rhymes with 'band'). The boat has no oar, and so he's at a loss - paddling with his arms would result in a tasty treat for the sharks. Eventually the answer comes - he removes the Knight's Cross from his lapel and uses it as a flash-signal. Using Morse, he expertly spells out 'S.O.S. SHARKS' (he has never used Morse in his life, and is only vaguely aware of its existence). Sure enough, a motor-boat skims out to rescue him, the pilot: the British actor Terence Stamp. From a distance, the island seems to have a perfectly normal pebble beach; only when the boat comes to a stop does he discover - what crunches beneath his feet are not pebbles but tens of millions Star Wars figures, and for as far as the eye can see. Terence Stamp explains in a reverential voice that this island is where they've come to resurrect the concept of religious determination. Somewhere, mixed among the deep mounds of figures there is a single Darth Vader. All the other characters are there in abundance, but no one has ever found a Darth Vader. Whoever finds that figure will become God. Kelvin joins the search with a glad heart. Months pass. Sometimes he finds a mail-away 'Redeemed Anakin' figure, which he knows to be rare and worth hundreds of pounds - but here is worthless. Sometimes they become excited because they see some all-black legs sticking out, but invariably they belong to an Imperial Gunner or a TIE Pilot. One of his companions on the island is a beautiful red-headed girl, and they fall deliriously in love. Except he laments how she always wears such revealing clothes, distracting him from the search. Whenever he suggests having sex, she refuses because 'it's the wrong time for transcendence'.

03.19. Tony Soprano (Kris Kelvin) becomes increasingly disturbed as Christopher's novel is serialised in a popular Bay newspaper. Each day, as the FBI reads it and gets wise, more of his capos are killed in climatic shoot-outs. Pauly is dead. Silv is dead. With panic attacks coming left, right and centre, he takes the problem to his psychiatrist Dr Melfi, but she evaporates in front of his eyes, causing him to spring out of his chair and smash a framed photograph of a three-legged dog. In his desperation he recruits a new capo to write a novel that will counter Christopher's. Against his better judgement, he selects a vicious, ruthless killer called Theodore Bagwell, who he knows to be a beguiling writer of pulps (rhymes with 'gulps'). He rushes home to settle the family and tell them that reality will soon be altering. Carmella is pragmatic, Meadow is grudgingly prepared, AJ is excited and wonders if Kurt Cobain will be resurrected. The family sits in the kitchen and waits. Carmella cooks pasta and they listen to an up-beat Sinatra CD. Only as an after-thought, Kris looks from the window and realises the ducks are not nesting in the pool. He panics and runs outside. Carmella insists he not worry; all they have to do is take the CD player out and play 'Somebody Up There Likes Me', as it's well-known that all water-nesting birds are attracted by Bowie. She smiles a little as she says this, and Kris wonders if she's joking. She's not. He runs down to his work-out room and finds Bagwell lounging on the exercise machine. But far from working on the novel, he's casually whittling a small black piece of plastic. Kris looms above him, menaces him, demands to know why he's not writing the book. 'Relax, boss. There's more than one way to fix a broken dog', says Bagwell, in his sumptuous southern lisp, and holds up a home-made action figure of Darth Vader.

03.21. Having returned to his home town, world-famous graffiti-artist Kris Kelvin is walking past the luxurious Arafat Hotel when the Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman appears at a window and beckons him inside. She shows him a series of sketchy, black-and-white surveillance photos. They are all disparate (for example, one merely shows an abandoned life-boat, another, what appears to be an angel plunging from a skyscraper window). She tells him she's devised a plan to go back to the birth of the universe and correct the inherent lack of purpose. Kelvin is game. They step onto Doom's time machine. Alongside them are Sid Vicious and Harpo Marx, who will come along, she explains, to make sure they alter the timeline as much as possible. As the square of light begins to move upwards over their bodies, Kelvin notices that the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is also present. 'Haven't you noticed yet?', he asks good naturedly. 'What?', asks Kelvin. Sartre smiles dismissively. 'It took me a long time to notice as well. When you have the time, just stop, look at things, and you'll see'. There is an explosion of sparks. The time machine malfunctions. The square of light freezes midway up Kelvin's torso; he notices for the first time that the light is not entirely void - it contains large banks of text. He concentrates and tries to make out what the words say. It's surprisingly easy, once his eyes are properly focused, _'When you have the time, just stop, look at things, and you'll see'. There is an explosion of sparks. The time machine malfunctions. The square of light freezes midway up Kelvin's torso; he notices for the first time -' _Abruptly, the floor beneath his feet falls away. He plunges a very long way and crumples in a heap in an all-white, amorphous room. There are people there; at first, the most disparate selection he can possibly imagine. One of the tennis-playing teenage killers from Michael Heneke's 'Funny Games', Malcom in the Middle, 'Dark Helmet' from Mel Brook's 'Spaceballs', the wife from Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker', and superheroes Miracle Man and Dr Solar: Man of the Atom. He struggles to understand what's happening, and feels sure he can never comprehend in a million years. 'What's going on?', he asks lightly. The teenage killer tentatively fingers the strings of his tennis racket. 'We're sleeper agents. You're our boss, and it's really a pleasure to meet you, sir'. His eyes twinkle. The glowing white space has a pleasing, meditative quality, but all the same, Kelvin wants to leave. Dr Solar proudly obeys and opens a door; he finds himself on a deserted, chrome-blue-tinted space station (rhymes with 'nation'). Wandering the shallow gantries and twisting corridors, he eventually finds a small room with a very nervous looking man. 'I just had a conversation with a group of fictional characters', Kelvin warns him. The man fondles his heavy beard, says queasily, 'Fictional characters, yeah. How about that?' 'Well?', asks Kelvin. The man tries several times to formulate the right words. It seems to Kelvin that he's gone mad several times over, and that madness has now doubled-back on itself to become a type of uber-thoughtful meditation. 'Is it a problem that they're fictional? You know, we get them a lot around here. But not just any fictional ones; they have to be the ones who already broke the fourth wall'. And Kelvin is about to spit that he doesn't understand, before he remembers Malcom from 'Malcom in the Middle', the way he so often complained to the people at home about the way life treated him. And the teenage killer from 'Funny Games', the way he asked the people from the real world their opinion of the murder he was about to commit. Kelvin feels acute fear. 'What's going on here?', he demands of the man, who responds with uncharacteristic rapidity. 'I could tell you what's going on, but I'm not sure I could tell you... _what's going on'. _

03.23. Having returned to his home town, doomed romantic Kris Kelvin is walking past the luxurious Arafat Hotel when the Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman appears at a window and beckons him inside. She tries to show him some sketchy, black-and-white surveillance photos, but he is too distracted to concentrate. There is something wrong, he senses, on a deep, intricate _psychic_ level. Deja-vu? Like rail-lines in his mind. He looks at Nicole Kidman, or at least, the woman he thought was Nicole Kidman. She smiles indulgently. He looks out of the broad bay window into the valley. Across the other side of town, perhaps a quarter mile distant, a small rock festival is in full swing. David Bowie is performing, 'Somebody Up There Likes Me', only it sounds far too crisp and precise, like a studio version. Kelvin's eyes flick up onto the branches of a distant tree and he watches them for some time as they lilt in the breeze. He gives a small, dismissive smile, then turns to face the girl. Without a doubt, she's the most beautiful he's ever seen, and in a way that reflects his own soul; something that has to be earned from second to shining second. 'For a moment, I thought this was all a dream'. 'What makes you think otherwise?' It's a good question, and he thinks for a moment. 'There are no moments of repose in a dream. In a dream, there's always some very involved storyline going on, and you're in the middle of it, and there's no time for casual thought'. Alt-Kidman smiles. 'I'd be sorry if I only ever inspired casual thoughts in you. Just now, on the beach, you were telling me that you wanted to ravish me across a rock'. All thoughts in Kelvin's mind fall over each other. He looks down into his hand and finds an action figure of Darth Vader. 'This is a dream?', he asks her ponderously. 'I've never known anything like it. It's...'. And she completes his awed sentence; 'Visceral. Dense. Solid. Tangible. It's OK to be impressed. You've been unconscious for a very long time'. 'How long?', asks Kelvin excitedly. But this is a complicated question which Alt-Kidman will answer as part of the back-story. 'A very long time ago, Kris, about the same time we realised we had immortal souls, we discovered a way to penetrate the Implicate Order. Do you remember?' Alas he does not. 'I was a novelist. You were a sub-atomic physicist, testing coherent neutrino bursts. You designed a synaptic relay which could delegate electromagnetic N-waves, or psychic energy, into inanimate objects, and then on and on, through the whole world in a chain reaction. We had such miraculous powers. We could make a coke-can origami into a little dancing figure, and the next day, we'd see other coke-can origami creatures on TV, and no one was surprised, because the universe had adopted it as part of the Implicate Order. But -'. She falters, and assesses how best to phrase an even more incredulous episode in the story. Kelvin holds her hands, though still he gasps. 'We felt a responsibility. We had god-like powers. We had to do something of god-like nobility. We decided to destroy entropy as a concept'.

Kelvin sits down on a beanbag and rubs his jaw. His mind wishes to rebel, to insist all this is krazy-talk. But he can't, because it carries a faint memory, the indelible tang of truth and of Hari Sarabande, his beloved with whom he could no more live without than feed himself into a mincing machine. He pulls her down and grins uproarously like Charlton Heston. 'Remind me more, please'. She gives a harsh, conspiratorial smile, which he enjoys no end. 'I wrote a novel about all the very worst things in the world. All the things which would eventually destroy mankind. It was easy. You theorised that if you could direct defiant psychic energy into the pages of the book, the universe would be bluffed into changing the Implicate Order for the better, and create a chain reaction which would go around the world'.

He is uneasy. "And this is where I've been ever since, inside the novel?"

She corrects him. "We've been here ever since. At least one of us had to be unconscious of what was truly going on, in order to fool the universe".

"Christ", breathes Kelvin. "It's like a fever dream. And yet, I don't remember any climatic final battles. Did I win? Did I destroy entropy?"

She frowns, almost tearful. "You came close a few times. But it's too insidious".

"But Hari, we're still here. We're still inside the dream. It's not too late".

"I -", she stares at him long and hard.

"What is the significance of the three-legged dogs?", he asks, in a sort of smiling demand.

Hari smiles and rubs her face. "There's no significance. They're just a metaphor for the human condition, the way we're inherently stifled and inarticulate, and it either makes you sad, or suicidal, or else you just don't think about it".

A long pause, and they are quite tranquil beneath the beautiful, sepiotone daylight. Strange, he thinks, that all this is conjured from second-to-second by synaptic flashes. Or is it actually any more unbelievable than the waking world, the way it's maintained by arch-capricious quantum waves? Urgently, Kelvin speaks another question, "What if it's not a metaphor? What if there's one person, who embodies all the arrogance and thoughtlessness of the universe, who is going around literally cutting dogs legs off?"

"That's horrible", says Hari sincerely, but with a twinkle in her eye (fool the universe, fool the universe).

Hannibal Smith. Comes together. He rises and moves to the little patch of carpet where Nicole Kidman first greeted him, stoops to pick up the thick wad of surveillance photos. One and all show a single man, standing at chef's chopping board, casually removing a dog's front leg. Part of him wishes he wasn't so able to identify the man, straight away, as if by instinct. A greater part of him is grateful, because he's always known, deep down. The way we all do. The man's mouth is conspicuously tender and red, like a character from 'Dune'. He has the eyes of an arrogant, teacher's pet child, and that's why you hate him.

Jamie Oliver.

"I can find him and kill him". Truly, Dr Kris Kelvin has never known such determination.

"It won't be easy. Now that you're fully conscious, the universe will adapt to make it tougher".

"'_It has to have been hard for you to know that it's worked'_, says Kris Kelvin the pop-philosopher. I refer you to Kill Bill".

She hugs him.

He asks, because he feels it's a suitable impasse, "Can we have sex yet?"

"No", she tucks his shirt in. "Sex will be our consolation prize back in the real world, if we fail".

He nods like a glum Terence Stamp. She takes a backwards step, almost ceremonial. "It's my turn to be unconscious. You have to knock me out".

"Can't you just go to sleep?", he wonders.

She coolly considers whether she could just fall asleep, and dream within a dream. Metaphors of metaphors, and all that's real is the love and hate.

"I'm too adrenalised. I have to believe I'm unconscious. Knock me out. It'll just _feel_ like pain".

Kelvin scowls and for the first time in the whole adventure feels that he's about to betray something sacred. He scowls some more, feels like a child about to burst into tears over something bizarrely idiosyncratic. Raising his fist, he hears a noise in his throat. Harvey Keitel in minute the last of Reservoir Dogs.

"Kill him for me, Kris. Kill him good".

The square of light recedes back to his feet and he steps forward into the cold, oppressive bunker. At first everything is silent, though eerie and transgressive. And then the distant sound of almighty bombs confirms he's come to the right place. Two forties-hair-bobbed secretaries rush past along an incredibly narrow corridor. No echoes. Lots of bombs. This is no way for anyone to live. Comes a fat general and, coincidentally, Kelvin can see he's thinking exactly the same haunted thought. "Where's your man?", he asks urgently.

The general insists he's not seeing anyone, though he soon surrenders and gives complicated directions through the network of thick stone walls. In fact, Kelvin is reassured by the tortuous route. This is, after all, a dream, and dreams are complex and involved. He sees a woman in a flowery Oliveoil dress sullenly smoking outside the luxurious alcove. And inside, there's your man. He's weeping over his dog; 'someone' has removed one of his legs.

"Calm down, you. You were going to poison her anyway", points out Kris.

Hitler weeps on; Blondie wags her tail and smiles dizzily. "You don't understand. I have only ever done what needs to be done".

"I understand all too well, mister. Now, you know what I'm here for. Gun. Bullets. Pronto".

The man carefully lays his dog down and retrieves from a drawer his shooting iron and a handful of kryptonite bullets.

"Be vigilant", says Hitler, "kryptonite drives you insane".

"'Insane' is only the same as dreaming", promises Kelvin, and prepares to go back to Doom's time machine.

"All the same", Hitler's paper face gives a weak grin, "it's good to have a secret weapon".

Kelvin grins back. Plan. Together. I love it. "This is not my secret weapon".

Anyone who is conscious agrees that taste is the most disposable of the senses. Therefore, celebrity chefs are the most disposable human beings. It's all empirical, but try to argue otherwise if you want. As for a celebrity chef who so gleefully advertises an omnipotent supermarket, who worships children as though they're anything other than gaudy, overpopulating nightmares, who sends his arch-frivolous hardbacks to the top of the best-sellers list with such a complete lack of thought or shame? Shame no longer exists. That paper could be used to print anything. Anything the eternal human mind can conceive of. 'The Book of Lies' by Aleister Crowley. Lovely, warm, 'In the Arena' by Charlton Heston. Maybe even a terrible book, thinks Kelvin. Who cares if it's a terrible book? That could be my concession to all the plebs in the post-Jamie-Oliver-World: if you must, use the paper to publish Shaun Hutson and Terry Pratchett books, because, hateful dross though they are, at least they require imagination. An inner life. We could gradually claw our way back. But it's a new world now. Kane films the killing of Abel on his phone and puts it on Youtube. Judas throws the Roman coins away, not because he's ashamed, but because he makes more money on the dole or educational allowance. John Noakes announces on Blue Peter that Shep is dead, and a child not only laughs, but runs up and shouts 'C-' into Noakesey's face, before retiring to the audience and playing insanity-inducing vocoder musak on its phone. Presently, Jamie Oliver is filming his new TV show, touring Britain's universities and showing all the hard-working (sic) students how to prepare delicious, cost-effective meals. And no, how dare you, it isn't just a broad concept. It's as important and scintillating as the Hadron Collider, for God's sake. The students crowd around his chopping board, smiling, smiling in exactly the same way as when they're protesting or rioting. Jamie Oliver chops away; he's a professional chef, yet he still needs to concentrate while he's chopping - don't his childish flaws make you love him as if he's your son?

He blithely busies himself, wholly ignorant of the fact that if it's boring even to watch those old films of Jackson Pollock producing such masterpieces, why should anyone want to watch _a man cooking_? 'The mundaneness of evil', thinks Hitler.

"Smoked dog's leg with spinach, mustard and nutmeg. Something special, something cheap. For brevity's sake, ladies and gentlemen, I've already cleaned and stripped the spinach, because believe me, the most strenuous part of the recipe is acquiring your dog's leg. It's important, of course, that you don't try to remove and flay the furry limb on the same work surface that you'll be cooking on - I'll be using here one of the legs of Buck, who was a sheep dog from a farm in North Herefordshire. He was old, and so that means the meat will be -"

From the back of hall, through the crowd of grinning, seemingly lobotomised students, walks a strange boy. He is perhaps in his middle teens, with an insanely angular jaw that resembles a stain on a wall. His outdated schoolboy shorts accompany a Metallica T, which he's pulled up over his skull. The students each clear a way for him, reacting with ten percent wry fascination, ninety percent mindless herd instinct. The boy, God knows, is acting very strangely - he is holding his hands upwards at his side, exactly like a totem pole. The pose is so effortless, however, it's like rigor mortis.

"I AM CORNHOLIO. I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE. YOU MUST FEED THE ALMIGHTY BUNGHOLE OR FACE DIRE WRATH".

Moving in zig-zags, punctuating his words with staggered laughter, no one has ever seen anything like him.

"_Bungholio! Wah! Bah-hamina. You may feed five thousand, but you will never feed the Bunghole of Cornholio, for we have but one bunghole and it is good_".

"Sir - please come with me", initially just one of the private security guards tries to corral the man, but is unprepared for such a tightly-wound ball of energy.

"ARE YOU THREATENING ME?"

"I'm not threatening you, sir, I just need you to calm down and step outside".

No dice. "MY PEOPLE HAVE EXISTED SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME. ALL WILL FACE THE JUDGEMENT OF THE ALMIGHTY BUNGHOLE".

More security guards surge to subdue the man. In fact, the optimal number; a small phone in the boy's shorts begins to ring. The tone; 'Somebody Up There Likes Me' by David Bowie. An explosion, which leaves no corner of the large hall untouched. It is powerful enough to have killed everyone, but by the law of averages, some have survived. By the Law of Satan, Jamie Oliver has survived. His platform has collapsed and he is reposed at the base, on the floor. His eyes, such as they are (stolen from a lobotomised pig) stare uncertainly into the choking veils of smoke. From the far end of the hall, a man is stepping coolly over the bodies of students. He's too far away, but he just can't help himself, and levels a gun at Jamie Oliver. High Noon. "Who are you?", shouts Jamie Oliver, weirdly, in a compelling, plaintive voice he's never used before, and never will again, because he doesn't have a personality.

"The Almighty Bunghole", says the man, with only trace levels of irony.

Unable to control himself, he takes aim at his nemesis and fires. Premature ejaculation. You never think it will happen to you. The bullet misses Oliver's head by a foot. Sheer adrenaline, or maybe his re-absorbance into the nightmarish kernel of Satan, gives the chef power to run forward and wrestle Kris Kelvin.

"You won't win", promises Satan. "This is my universe".

Dr Kelvin head-butts the demon, because it seems a very Hollywood-climatic-final-fight thing to do. Other notable elements of the fight include: a Shatner-esque clasped-hands-blow to Satan's stomach, a kick in the balls and several very rapid punches to the head, every one of which the audience is awed by. Weighed in the balance, however, the fight really just boils down to each man clasping the handle of the kryptonite gun and wrestling for dominance. Kelvin is confident that he can keep hold of it indefinitely. Unfortunately, this doesn't help with the way Satan is gradually, millimetre by strained millimetre, moving the barrel directly over his heart.

"This is what you get", smiles Satan, "for being conscious".

The gun fires; Kelvin decides that he hates dreaming. Blackness comes in heavy blotches at the corners of his vision, plus a sophisticated deja-vu that this is the way the world has always ended.

From the sunlit fire-door at the edge of the hall, the Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman, who was to be Jamie Oliver's surprise guest, loiters uncertainly. She watches the fight with tremulous eyes that belie her true strength of character. When the violence is apparently over, she moves to the chef's side.

"I had to do it. I had no choice. He was a religious fundamentalist".

"It's fine", says Kidman, in a very dreamy voice.

"Will you -", Oliver rises, rubbing his crotch painfully, "- help me back to my trailer?"

Kidman clasps his back and they move to walk away. With a last glance, she sees the dead man's fist unfurl in a reflex. From it tumbles a small black figure. The Hollywood actress stoops to retrieve it. Darth Vader.

Time seems to stop as she stares ponderously at the toy man.

She smiles malevolently at Jamie Oliver. A boy with a shoe-brush hairstyle and a grey Megadeth T walks up to him. "You're going to die as if you never existed. Dumb-ass".

He laughs intermittently, never falteringly, and it's the most victorious sound Alt-Kidman has ever known.

"You heard the man", she states. "Because kryptonite bullets? Trying to sieve you out of any and all human experience? N, please. We both know that's not really how we fight. You're an endurance test which lasts eighty or ninety years, then stops. You're a mire, created because, when you only live for a certain amount of time, you have no pride. We will live forever, and we have infinite pride. So what are you going to do? Get your Polish and Slovakian slaves to chase us out of Dodge? You don't pay them enough. You're a fat, lazy ponce, and that's how you're going to die".

And so she looks on, satisfied, as Jamie Oliver's flesh melts over his bones, and he vanishes, and somewhere, sometime, everyone in the human race is redeemed. At first, there is apparently little else to do, as always seems the way with happy endings. But then the life flows back into her. Kris blinks open his eyes; she helps him back onto his feet. His eyes question her, and she raises her fist in the guerrilla-victorious gesture. From there, they hug and sway drunkenly onto the platform of Doom's time Machine. How do you like that: between their feet runs four-legged Blondie the Dog.

The lighted panel comes to life beneath them, and he considers how they must look like Deckard and Rachel in the final few frames of Bladerunner. This is unacceptable. He kisses her passionately, kisses her neck, gets to grip with the small of her back, the way it's ornate and yet super-tactile. He's never known anything like it.

"I'm going to send you into a frenzy", he says lustfully.

Says Hari, "Hallelujah".

"Rhymes with -", and he falters, confused as to what he's saying.


End file.
